Information for Instructors

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Please encourage--but do not require--students to make appointments at the Writing Center.

We appreciate the support from instructors who encourage students to use the UK Writing Center. The majority of students say that they find out about the Writing Center from their instructors.

We hope that every UK instructor strongly encourages students to visit the Writing Center, but we ask that instructors do not require a student to make an appointment.

Each consultation lasts 45-60 minutes; we therefore have to focus on specific writing issues that students identify, or that we identify, as most pressing. We do not try to address all writing issues on every page of a student paper.

Each consultation will have a different outcome because each one is different. Some students provide assignment instructions; others do not. When we ask students if they want to work on specific issues, some students helpfully direct us to one or two primary concerns while other students tell us that they need help with everything. Similarly, some students share detailed feedback from their instructors and peers, allowing us to help them review their writing with these comments in mind. Other students, however, do not provide instructor or peer reviews. Moreover, each student is at a different stage of writing, and each communicates with us differently.

In our consultations, we help students learn how to review their writing from the reader's perspective. We help students understand how to fulfill assignment requirements, write for a specific audience, and learn academic standards of edited written English. We help students learn editing and proofreading strategies, but we do not merely direct students to "fix" grammatical errors. Finally, we help students locate and use online and print resources to help them follow models of formatting and documentation style, but we do not do the work for the students.

Consultation results inevitably vary. Becoming a more effective and confident writer requires patience and sustained effort over time; one consultation is only a beginning.

From time to time, students ask us to provide documentation for consultations because their instructors have required the Writing Center visit. As professionals in the Writing Center, however, we have to honor student confidentiality, just as instructors do, so we do not contact instructors to verify student appointments. What we can do, at the student's request, is email a client report to the student, who can then choose to share that report with the instructor.

Please do not send entire classes of students to the Writing Center. We can accommodate only so many clients at any given time due to our scheduling and staffing limitations.

We would love to visit your class to talk about our Writing Center services.

You can also bring your class to the Writing Center, where we can show students who we are and what we can do for them.

If you have questions, or if you would like to plan a class visit to the Writing Center or request that we visit your class, please email Judy Gatton Prats, Director of the Writing Center, at judithgprats@uky.edu.